ROE DUBS

Roe Dubs is a collaborative YouTube channel co-created by one of my best friends Anna Roelofs and I, in which we create large scale fandubs for video games that don’t contain voice acting, so that viewers can experience the stories of games in a new and more accessible way. One of the other major goals of the channel is to create opportunities for non-professional and hobbyist voice actors to get their foot in the industry, gain experience, and build a strong network with other voice actors. We host auditions for projects on the website Casting Call Club, and as of August 2023, have received over 3,000 individual auditions across 5 projects. The channel is still small, but growing at a steady pace, with currently 250+ subscribers and 7,000 views across all videos.

My role at Roe Dubs is the Head of Production, which has me oversee the technical and video production side of the channel. I do some editing on all videos, while also coordinating tasks for the other editors on the team. I make repositories of lines submitted by our voice actors for the editors to easily keep track of lines for various segments of the game. I mod the games we dub to make the viewing experience better in conjunction with the voice acting. I record gameplay for the dubs, on top of creating guides for other people on the team on how to record games for the channel. As well as assisting Anna with various other tasks related to the channel.

First video in our Super Paper Mario series

Production Breakdown

Planning

When a game is chosen to for dubbing, I begin the planning phase. I first do a practice run of the game to familiarize myself more with it. As I play through the game, I take notes on how to make the best possible route for the recording. My mentality for these dubs is that people come to the channel to experience the story of game, not the gameplay, but we can’t just cut from one dialog scene to the next. This means I devise a route that streamlines the gameplay as much as possible. To use the first game we dubbed as an example, Super Paper Mario, I found that I could use doors as a natural way to transition between rooms with dialog since the game fades to black when a door closes. So while routing the game, I wrote notes on which rooms had dialog and the quickest way to a door after dialogue. You can see how I did notes for Chapter 2 of SPM below:

Another key part of routing is about figuring out which optional dialogue we’re going to show. In the case of Super Paper Mario, this meant which character I’d be playing as for which scenes, which optional NPC’s we’d be talking to, and what optional dialog scenarios I’d choose. I used a lot of save states on emulators to test the different dialog options and how each scene played out with each character. I’d choose according to what I thought fit best with each scene. NPCs were a bit more interesting, as for the most part we chose to avoid talking to NPCs for the sake of time and pacing, but during my practice runs, I’d still talk to all of them and add certain ones to the route if their dialogue contributed to the story in a meaningful way.

Last part of the planning phase is getting the game itself ready for recording. For the videos, we want the voice acting to feel like it was originally part of the game, which some games have counters to this. In Super Paper Mario, there was what I called “clicking” in dialog boxes. When text appears on screen, it makes a little click sound to simulate voice, however since we were adding proper voices, we didn’t want this clicking sound to play. The game had no option to turn off the clicking sound, so I had to get creative. Originally me and the other editors were just going to edit out the clicking sound in the editing phase, but after 2 videos of this, we decided it was far too difficult to do for some sections, so I decided to mod the game to remove the clicking from the game itself. I did this by extracting the game’s .brsar file and modifying values within it to set the output volume of the clicking sound effect to zero. Took a lot of trial and error, especially since the game used a lot of identical sound bites in different areas, and some had to be replaced with empty sound files instead of just muting them because it caused the game to crash when opening certain doors. Eventually it worked perfectly and I was able to record the game. Every other game we’ve done so far has had a similar issue and required some level of modification.

Recording & Editing

The recording phase is fairly straightforward, but requires a lot of precision. Mainly with timing each dialog box to host enough time for an actor to read their lines. I developed a strategy for getting the timing down that I’ve taught to other members on the team to ensure quality on the videos. Aside from that, recording just comes down to executing what was detailed in the notes flawlessly, and making sure to keep save states of various parts of the game in case re-recordings are needed.

Once the footage is recorded, then comes the editing phase. Roe Dubs enlists multiple editors to assist with our projects, and I act as the coordinator for them. I take the footage and edit it all the gameplay for how it will look in the final video, then the footage is exported and sent off to the editors for them to add the lines from the voice actors and actresses. This helps us have multiple videos being edited at once since these can take a while. Once all the lines have been added, the video is put through a review process to try and catch any errors. Upon approval, we then upload the video. There’s still a lot we’re learning and smoothing out with our video making process, but we’ve been improving steadily and videos are beginning to come out at a faster rate.